[This is a companion piece to a post I wrote in August 2023.]
The second week of October, I arrived in Washington state to help my dad take care of my stepmom L in what I now know was her final six weeks of hospice. She was battling pancreatic cancer – one of the scariest and most intimidating illnesses imaginable.
I don’t think of her as having lost a battle with cancer, but sadly, she did die in mid-November. In the weeks leading up to her death, I was forced to confront my own previous assumptions about the home as proxy for a ‘good’ death and my shock about how much of hospice care in the United States falls directly to a patient’s family.